And it’s Daring Bakers time once again.
Helping Dolores host this month are Alex (Brownie of the Blondie and Brownie duo), and Jenny of Foray into Food. And since most of us know jack about alternative baking, we’ve once again turned to Natalie of Gluten-a-Go-Go to assist us.
Our leading lady this month is Shuna Fish Lydon of Eggbeater and her signature caramel cake.
RECIPE SOURCE
Caramel Cake with Caramelized Butter Frosting courtesy of Shuna Fish Lydon, as published on Bay Area Bites. Shuna Fish Lydon’s recipe can be found here.
The optional additional challenge was: Golden Vanilla Bean Caramels from Pure Dessert by Alice Medrich, Artisan Press, Copyright 2007, ISBN: 978-1579652111 (You will notice that I did not have time to do these. Thank goodness for optional!)
Well, this was a fun challenge, because I’ve never really worked with caramel before. You might remember a couple of posts back I mentioned making last month’s pizza challenge super late with Marie, Amanda, Wisit and Debbie. As I mentioned back there, that was part one of the baking done that day. We did quite a lot. Part two, I guess, would be this. Actually we baked another cake as well, so maybe I’ll include it in my post below.
So then; caramel cake.
Since we needed the caramel syrup for both the caramel cake and the icing, we started with that. First we put sugar and water on the stove until it turned caramel coloured, and then we added a cup of water to stop the caramelization process. Whoa! I mean, I knew it would do it, but watching the caramel just go FOOM! when you add the water all at once is really awesome. What we did was just toss the water in in one go and get the hell out of the way. It worked nicely, and then we continued cooking it until the caramel sauce was sticky to the fingers once cooled. So far so good! While I was working on the pesto for the pizza, my sister and Wisit started on the cake. They mixed the butter and the sugar and then added all the caramel, assuming that it was 1/3 of a cup. Actually, it was probably more than a cup. So then we had to start over again, including more caramel syrup. Oy. So we got a repeat performance of the FOOM, and then continued as usual, with accurate measurements this time. :p
Having heard that everything was too sweet for so many people, we made this in cupcake molds for smaller individual portions. The cake came out and we tried it, and hm, it was a little too sweet for (some of) us.. (Wisit had left already at that point. He tried it the next day and LOVED it. Man, does he have a sweet tooth).
Caramel (cup)cakes
But then we made the icing. We started by halving the recipe, as we heard this was the sweeter part of the challenge and figured we didn’t want so much of it. Then we took the already halved recipe and halved again only the sugar. The original full recipe calls for ONE POUND of icing sugar. I think just reading that I turned diabetic. So now we were looking at half a recipe and only a quarter pound of icing sugar. We didn’t even end up adding all of the icing sugar we put aside. We tasted it, it was so sweet it hurt your brain. We added a bit of salt to cut the sweetness, and it was so sweet it hurt your brain followed by the taste of salt. ICK. Probably by the next day the salt got absorbed more and then made the whole thing taste better, but nobody wanted to try it. All of us thought that this for us was waaaaay beyond too sweet. It never made it onto the cakes. I don’t know… maybe Wisit would have liked it. But personally, I like things rich, savoury, sour, bitter even, but am not a huge fan of sweet or salty. Caramel flavour is really nice and you can have some that is not too sweet. I thought the caramel syrup was lovely in small nibbles and would have been great with something not sweet to give it a sweet edge… but not for me with an already sweet cake. Now there are a lot of different sort of people in the world with a lot of different tastes. One person’s yummy is another person’s no thanks. This recipe was my no thanks, and this icing recipe was my hellllll no thanks. But if you have a sweet tooth, try it! Lots of Daring Bakers loved it.
We decided to be creative with how we put the icing on the cupcakes.
Before people jump on me for criticizing a recipe, I’m not. The recipe is fine, and if you have a sweet tooth, go ahead, you’ll love it. But for me, if you plan one day to surprise me with a cake, please make it one that is full of very very very dark chocolate and not this one. Nothing wrong with the recipe, but this one’s just not for me.
Anyway, we finished the day of baking off with making a basic sponge cake with a chocolate/banana/tofu icing. I personally prefer other icings, cause you can taste the tofu in it, but it was still good, and Marie really loved it. Anyway, it is very tasty even with a slight tofu taste, and I would definitely use this if I were looking for a vegan icing (the cake wasn’t veganized).
Just for kicks, here are some pictures of that cake to round off our day of baking.
Sponge cake with chocolate banana tofu icing
With a slice missing to see the layers
yum!
